Integrated circuits have become increasingly prevalent in today's society. The number of digital systems that include integrated circuits continues to steadily increase and may be driven by a wide array of products and systems. Added functionalities may be provided to integrated circuits in order to execute additional tasks or to effectuate more sophisticated operations in their respective applications or environments. Additionally, system parameters of integrated circuits may dictate that their operations be performed in an optimal time interval, which allows for even more operations to be accommodated in a given clock cycle. These rigorous demands associated with production and design generally result in the need for more advanced and complex verification processes and procedures.
Verification techniques are generally implemented in order to ensure that an integrated circuit or a digital element is capable of performing its intended functionality. In other cases, verification techniques may be used in order to ascertain whether a selected characteristic, behavior, or property is present in a given target circuit. Flaws or inaccuracies in an integrated circuit or a digital element may inhibit system functionality and/or cause significant operational problems in a corresponding architecture.
In integrated circuit and other digital applications, manual inspection is simply not feasible as there is a prolific amount of information that must be checked or validated. In addition to being cumbersome, manual inspection is incapable of meeting optimal accuracy parameters. In other scenarios, the task of verification or design validation may be executed using a simulation. Using a simulation based approach, a designer may analyze test vectors in order to verify or validate the correctness of the design. However, such a process is highly time intensive and impractical because it is not feasible to exhaustively simulate a design to ensure correctness for every possible outcome. Accordingly, the ability to verify or validate a design for any integrated circuit or digital element presents a significant challenge to digital system designers and integrated circuit manufacturers.